Type Prediction for Entities in DBpedia by Aggregating
Multilingual Resources
Thi-Nhu Nguyen1,4, Hideaki Takeda2,
Khai Nguyen2,3, Ryutaro Ichise2, Tuan-Dung Cao4
1

Haiphong University, Vietnam
nhunt@dhhp.edu.vn
2
National Institute of Informatics, Japan{takeda,nhkhai,ichise}@nii.ac.jp
3
University of Science, VNU-HCMC, Vietnam
nhkhai@fit.hcmus.edu.vn
4
Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam
dungct@soict.hust.edu.vn

Abstract. The entity type is considered as very important in DBpedia. Since
this information is inconsistently described in different languages, it is difficult
to recognize the most suitable type of an entity. We propose a method to predict
the entity type based on a novel conformity measure. We combine theconsideration of the specific-level and the majority voting. The experimentresult shows that our method can suggest informative types and outperforms thebaselines.
Keywords: DBpedia, Ontology, Mappings, Conformity, Consistency

1

Introduction

DBpedia is built upon the community effort to extract the knowledge from Wikipedia[1]. Currently, contributors from many countries have joined the DBpedia mapping
project, whose target is to map the Wikipedia templates into the types (e.g.,Species, Person, and Place) in DBpedia ontology [2]. Despite the maturity of
the DBpedia community, the lack of consensus between the contributors fromdifferent languages is still remaining as an issue.
In DBpedia, a real-world entity is represented by multiple instances. Each instanceis described in a specific language and its type is based on the mappings constructed
for that language. Because the mappings are manually created for different languages,
the types of particular instances are different even when those instances describe thesame entity. Concretely, considering an entity, some types may be different at thespecific-level, correct, or incorrect. For example, the entity of Barack Obama isrecognized as Person, Politician, President, Artist and Book in 29languages. Here, there is an agreement between Person, Politician, andPresident but still different at the specific levels. Meanwhile, Artist and Book

Table 1. The statistics of the agreement of types between two languagesnlsv# instances have type inboth languages
308462ennl

20124853.28%

ensv

158842

8.47%

en

es

14923430.92%

Languages% instances havethe same type21.86%

iten

14481510.59%

ensv

158842nl

es

143634

8.47%
77.53%

pt

en13277368.55%

nl

it

130938

8.83%

pl

it

1189358.75%

are incorrect. In this situation, choosing the most suitable type of an entity isnecessary to guarantee the consolidation of DBpedia but it becomes a difficult task.
According to a preliminary analysis, the agreement of type assignment among
different languages is low, even if only comparing two particular languages. Table 1illustrates the percentage of instances sharing the same type in 10 language pairs, inwhich the number of instances had a type in both languages are the most among all
476 language pairs. In general, only 37% pairs have more than 50% of instances
assigned with the same type.
Recently, entity type prediction is considered as an important problem. It is helpful
for the utility of DBpedia versions whose mapping community is immature. Inaddition, it is also the core of automatic mapping creation [3].
The simple ideas of type prediction are majority voting and most specific ancestor.
The disadvantage of majority voting is that the suggested type is not specific enoughfor an entity. The most specific ancestor even returns more general types.
In this paper, we propose a new method to predict the most suitable type of anentity. Our method is the improvement of majority voting. In detail, we focus on how
to retrieve more specific types.

2Type suggestion

In this section, we describe how to predict the most suitable type for an entity. Ouridea is based on the combination of the specific-level and the majority voting. The
input is a set of the most specific-level types assigned by different languages. We( ) of the most specific-level type . The conformity is adefine the conformity
recursive value taking the sum of the frequency of and the conformity of its parent.
( )

( )

(( ))

(1)

Fig. 1. All types of Barack Obama entity and their frequency.

Where theof is the number of languages treating the entity as . For anentity, we select the most suitable type by picking the one with the highest
conformity. Obviously, this chosen type will meet the condition that it is used in themost languages and also enough specific. If there are many types that have the same
highest conformity, we rank the type based on the conformity of their parent type.
Let’s consider the example in Fig.1. In this figure, the entity of Barack Obama isassigned to 6 types in 29 languages. The conformity of the type President is thehighest ((President) =18). Therefore, it is selected as the prediction result.

3Experiment and evaluation

We compare our method with a manually crafted dataset and two other baselines: (1)majority voting and (2) most specific ancestor. We build an entity database from allavailable language versions of DBpedia. An entity is the compilation of the instancesinterconnected via owl:sameAs links. The difficulty of type suggestion is thediversity of types. Therefore, we select the entities with high inconsistency.
Concretely, we first randomly select 500 entities whose type is available in at least 5
languages. Then, we pick up the 100 most inconsistent ones. Here, the inconsistency
is estimated by the entropy of types’ frequency. Different from the conformity in Eq.
1, in order to guarantee the hierarchical relations, transitive types are counted. Inwhich, transitive types are a set of ancestor types. After the selection, an expert isasked to assign the most suitable type among available of the entity (3). Finally, we
compare the results of our method, (1), (2) against (3).
Table 2 implies that our method gives the best result. As entities of highinconsistency are selected, the most specific ancestor method always chooses theowl:Thing, which is the root of the DBpedia ontology. Although majority voting isbetter than the most specific ancestor, in general, its result is not specific enough. This
experiment demonstrates our prediction method is good but still 45% of the predictedtypes are different from human’s opinion. Most of them belong to types of place
entity because among countries, the definitions of administrative region andresidential area different. DBpedia ontology currently lacks types to represent allTable 2. The accuracy of type suggestion methods

Our method
55%

Majority voting
44%

Most specific ancestor
0%

these dissimilarities. For example, Voultegon is a commune in France but there is notype for commune. Therefore, this entity should be mapped to Settlement type.
However, our method returns the inaccurate type City because this type is more
specific than Settlement.

4The demo

We build a tool to visualize the entity types. A user can input the keywords in any
language or a URI to query the entity. The database contains 86,290,758 entities,
which are constructed from 128,866,644 instances of all languages. We use Lucene1
to have the entities indexed by all labels (i.e., rdfs:label) provided in alllanguages. We build a tool named MLDQ 2 to visualize hierarchically types indifferent languages, the suggested types of our method and other baselines, and some
general information of the entity (e.g., the entropy of inconsistency).

5Conclusion and future work

In this work, we proposed a new method that combines the consideration of thespecific-level and the majority voting to suggest the most suitable type of an entity.
Three methods were evaluated and the results show that our method is the mostpromising one although it remains some weaknesses. For future work, we will
evaluate our method with deeper analyses, including comparisons to more baselines.
We also aim to improve our method by considering the conformity of transitive types
in order to give more accurate predictions.

References
1. Lehmann, J.; Isele, R.; Jakob, M; et al.: DBpedia - A Large-scale, Multilingual Knowledge
Base Extracted from Wikipedia. The Journal Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability,Applicability. vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 167-195. (2015 )2. Mendes, PN.; Jakob, M.; Bizer, C.;. DBpedia: A Multilingual Cross-Domain Knowledge
Base. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources andEvaluation, pp. 1813-1817. (2012).
3. Palmero, A.; Giuliano, C.; Lavelli, A.: Automatic Mapping of Wikipedia Templates for
Fast Deployment of Localised DBpedia datasets. In Proceedings of the 13th International
Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies, pp. {1:1-1:8}(2013).
12https://lucenenet.apache.org/
https://sites.google.com/site/iswc2016demo/